


It's you and me: The story of a Pocket Monster Hunter

by shishiou



Category: Monster Hunter (Video Games), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series)
Genre: Angst, Harm to Animals, Hunting, Literary References & Allusions, Magic, Other, Post-Apocalypse, Purple Prose, Sad, Superstition, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-11
Updated: 2014-05-29
Packaged: 2017-12-26 07:18:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/963148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shishiou/pseuds/shishiou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pokemon/Monster Hunter crossover. Purple, beatnicky prose. Resulted angstier than I had intended.  Trigger warning for violent themes and ruthless hunting. If you don't want to read depictions of Pokemon being hurt, it's best to steer clear of this one.</p><p>There are many (not-so-)subtle references to the Pokémon and Monster Hunter gameworlds, just for the fun of it :)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A heart so true

The icy air of the northeastern Kalos tundras shears through my skin with the cruelty of beastly claws. I make a mental note of this pain, name it, wrap it up in a little ball, and put it away. I've been sitting still in this spot for five days. I could stand fifty more, if need be—I'm no stranger to cold weather, and I've learned long ago that, when there's something you must do, you must pull through. I keep my gaze up and unfocused and aware of everything, of the azure sky already starting to darken, of the frozen, ominous mountains far away, of the low grass withering noiselessly. The thin shrubbery that gives my shelter a semblance of camouflage smells good, earthy with a trace of mint, but I eye it suspiciously as if it could at any moment grow living vines and strangle me senseless. It's not like me, being this paranoid… I shiver and, as if to mock my resolve, an unexpected, persistent blast of the infamous cavewinds pierces through every part of my skin not sheltered in my Ninetales furcoat. I reach for the warm canteen and take a sip of the "Hot Drink"—a permanently bubbling ooze extracted from the embergall glands of unevolved Magbys, currently being (carefully) farmed for this purpose—and decide that I must increase my fur coverage later. It took more than ten months to gather all this gear—and more than ten years to learn how to _use_ all this gear—but there's always something to improve… It's too late to worry now. Resolving to save psychic energy, I relax deliberately, and let the inner warmth of the queer intoxicating liquid burn through my veins. I snap my attention to focus and stay still, ten seconds, thirty, one minute, five, ten, sixty, each moment passing without hurry, without past or future, with only the wide clear sky for company.

Then all sounds suddenly go quiet and an undefinable shimmer spreads over the air like thin iridescent dust, and I know it's here.

It's magnificent. Each of the eight branches of its antlers glitters in luminous colours, red and cyan and violet, and it moves with the grace and poise of the unicorns of myth, as if all Stantlers were just clumsy imitations made by some jealous, incompetent god. I've seen a few legendary beasts in my time, but looking at Xerneas right now, I realize it's the most beautiful of all magic monsters—the most beautiful living thing left in this world.

I don't take my eyes of it for a moment. Quietly, quietly, I draw my strop (a strip of rough Sharpedo hide, decorated with geometric patterns), lift an arrow from the floor, and give the tip a last-minute polish. I know I'll only get one chance, so the point must be absolutely sharp; it's crafted from the cold-steel fangs of a Mawile I myself murdered (that thing bit right through heavy Steelix armour; I ended up strangling it with my own hands before it could chew me like so many berries; when I close my eyes I can still picture the expression on his face—) _and_ coated in the most toxic of Garbodor sludges. I raise the bow: sturdy mega-Ampharos hairstring, flexible Kangaskhan composite bone-and-sinew traced with unholy unown runes, and a couple curse charms carved from the fearstones of Mismagii and the hollow eyes of Shedinjas. Always come prepared. Taking care to avoid the fletching (I found Staraptor works best), I nock the arrow on the string and pull it back all the way, charging a direct shot. Just as I raise the tip, the monster, with supernatural intuition, looks right at me with its big clear eyes. There's an undefinable, timeless moment in the cold as we acknowledge each other, and—I release the shot. The arrow flies with dreadful speed and pierces right through the X of its pupils, as if they were a target in some game. The beast's shrill cry of pain and fear hurts my eardrums before I'm attacked with a terrible magic blast—but the camp was prepared for that too, and I withstand the impact safely behind the cold metal of a large Shieldon plate. I'm nonetheless thrown to the ground as the beast gallops away.

That too was part of the plan. It predictably heads northward for the safest crevice in the barren mountainscape, and I cover my ears: a few moments later the ground trembles under the blast of the gunpowder and poison bombs I had planted on its probable path. I run towards it noisily, making sure to be seen, shooting a rain of the steelfanged arrows. The Xerneas stops and looks back unsurely and a cold shiver grips my spine and knots my stomach, but then it finally grows too startled and scared to attack, and runs away limping. I've at last managed to bring it from fight to flight.

I head back, stash the bow, and take the greatsword.  
This thing doesn't deserve to be called a sword. It's more of a huge slab of raw metal.  
I wouldn't even be able to move it from the ground if it wasn't made of uncanny living steel.  
Its once-proud square spikes and blue gemshards still adorn and protect it even in this decayed shape.  
I strap the abomination to my back. I can't run carrying it, but I can walk.  
Suppressing a long sigh, I set out into the night.

When a Xerneas moves, it touches the ground so lightly that it won't leave hoofprints, not even on snow. It will, however, leave a blood trail—if you put an iron arrow through its skull and blow half a dozen barrels of gunpowder under its legs. Tracking my game is trivial. I spot the monster as a lonesome bundle of colourful rods topping some dark mass on the ground, glowing a soft blue aura wherever touched by the moonlight. It has failed to find proper shelter, though as I approach it I notice that small flowers are already sprouting from the unnaturally red blood, and what was once a random stretch of lifeless ground is already starting to feel like a holy grove.

The beast is asleep in its exhaustion. I circle it cautiously so that I'm able to look it in the face; I owe it as much. It has an expression of perfect peace, like a sleeping saint. I draw the greatsword, slide my left hand to the steel pommel, grip the ivory handle lightly with the right just below the guard and raise the blade over my head, holding it up there full of promises. I see all the stars there is to see and notice there are no clouds and, for a tenth of a second, wonder how come my cheeks seem to be wet—and I bring the blade down in a wide cutting motion, slashing cleanly through Xerneas' neck, splashing the snow broadly with a blood that shines red even in the dark of the night.

I thrust the greatsword in the ground and lean on it and breathe and stay there listening to the silence of the starry skies.

Then I draw a huntersknife and start hacking the horns loose.

My name is Red, and I am a Pokémon Hunter.


	2. A world we must defend

On the dirt of the village ground, framed by the creeping claws of half-withered, thorny weeds, two small, snotty children were playing Pocket Monsters.

The game was like this. Each child carried some kind of critter, typically a horned beetle, which they cared for and tried to "train" in a childish, haphazard way. They didn't keep them literally in pockets—their crude Rattata-skin vests seldom had pockets at all—but rather used little cages they themselves built, tying together small sticks. Those bugs who survived the "training" were pitted against each other in a kind of arthropodic cockfighting. A small circle was drawn on the dirt, and whichever creature was first pushed outside, flipped over, or murdered, was the loser.

No one knew when and how did the children learn this sport. The sullen, silent adults seemed to be somehow bothered by it, but never said anything.

In that day's fight both bugs were common horned beetles, but they didn't seem very combative. They just stood there thinking their empty insect thoughts. Gold, sitting on a treestump, watched the battle with an indefinable melancholic expression, eyes vacant. He didn't even notice when the stranger started approaching, despite the fact that the man _should_ , by all counts, stand out from the villagers like a Vivillon in the snow ( _when have I last seen Vivillons?_ ). The stranger was, evidently, a hunter. He wasn't that older than Gold, perhaps three or four years, but somehow he _felt_ old as the mountains. Perhaps it was his sheer size; legs thick as pillars, arms twice the girth of Gold's, and a body so solid that even the absurdly large backpack didn't seem heavy on him; and all that mass was built from the mute, unstated, scarred muscles of someone who actually uses them, not the showy, anatomical muscles of a Bodybuilder ( _what was a Bodybuilder again?_ ). Of course, all this deduction was beside the point—only a hunter would walk around in such expensive monsters' fur, with such an array of potions and herbs and strange hollow stones and thingamajigs hanging from belts and pockets and hooks, with that many amulets and charms and animal decorations and fangs and feathers and disturbing figures sculpted in ivorybone. He likely had an entire armoury packed in a box somewhere nearby, and probably spent most of his time gathering better materials and crafting better weapons, so that he could gather even better materials—that is, kill bigger beasts. Hunters, with their smell of sweat and gunpowder and tanned hide and dead things, made Gold sick. Sure, you had to fight the creatures to protect the village, and if you spotted one wandering nearby, you'd go after it, because it would attack the people sooner or later, and some of them were terrifyingly powerful, some of them preyed on children and dreams and souls, and when those were around, hired hunters were very welcome—but even then, the very idea of the _humans_ going out to attack _monsters_ felt repulsive, villainous… inhuman.

As the large figure moved closer, Gold was taken by some old, deep fear, and wondered whether doing what monsters do—hunting—doesn't make you the same as them.

The man stopped by the battle-ring and stepped on both bettles at once, in a casual way, with a heavy lined Bouffalant-leather boot ( _how do I know that?_ ). There was no way the bugs could have survived. The scrawny children—it was hard to decide whether they were boys or girls—froze in place, then grimaced and started crying all at once, staring accusingly at the stranger. The man returned the look, pointed toward his foot , lifted it, and kept pointing at the crushed bugslime and the battle-ring. The children went quiet and looked down in supressed silence, whimpering from time to time.

It was more than Gold could handle. "Who do you think you are", he snapped, "and why are you doing this to the kids? Get out of our village! You're not wanted here!" The man just looked at him saying nothing, and in that moment of cold and quiet, looking up at his bearded face, something that had been stirring in Gold's mind surfaced with such a shock that he felt nauseous. "I—I _know_ who you are. I _know_ you. You're… you're Red, right?"

The man kept looking, without any sign of reaction.

"That's right, you never said anything. Please, Red, please, talk to me"—Gold was surprised at his own quavering voice but went on—"I've been sick, Red, many years sick, I woke up here after… what happened, and no one knows what it was, and I think of the old cities and of the monsters and I ask myself every day and I _have to know._ I know how hard it is for you but _talk to me_ , Red."

The children watched attentively, forgetting about the beetles entirely. Red said nothing. It was rather hard to explain but he could somehow answer with silence, pressuring you into talking more.

"You always kept to yourself, always did everything alone, right? Look at you, all bloody and messy." Gold had the need to say hurtful things, but some back part of his mind noted that, even if a bit gruffy, Red was quite clean, and all his little bags and contraptions were distributed over his body in a careful, utilitarian layout. Gold made an effort to ignore this part of his mind. "Are you _that_ afraid of people, that after all those years you'd leave an old friend in the dark only to bow down to your fear?" No reaction. Gold sat back down, the fight in him fizzing out fast. He sighed. "The only one you would ever talk to was… Green, right?", he half-whispered, but _now_ there was a reaction, though Red didn't look angry or sad as Gold expected, just weary. Red turned his back and started walking, slow and steady. He was the first sign Gold ever found of his old life, and he really, really wanted to go after him, but he didn't.

⁂

But after sunset, in the moonless night, when Gold lied sleeplessly on the straw mats and Piloswine blankets of his hut, he was suddenly aware of someone to his side, and somehow he wasn't afraid, and only after many minutes did Gold realize that he already knew who it was. Red slept so quietly that he could be dead, except life radiated from him like heatwaves. Gold didn't even think of waking him to ask questions but just stayed still, gaze lost on the bamboo ceiling, going again and again through the memories of his childhood, now much clearer than in the last years of dirt and snow and battling every day to survive.

⁂

When Gold woke up, the cloudy sky was already lit—at least, as lit as it ever got in these parts. Red had disappeared, but Gold found some objects left on his only table. There was what looked like a Shuckle shell, but on a closer look, had been fashioned into a handshield, the holes barred with some kind of bony plate that Gold couldn't identify. There was a short curved saber, which Gold recognized as a crafted Scythersblade, with a wooden grip and dark-green metal pommel. And there was some sort of loose-leaf notebook, with one of the leaves laid over the battered brown chamois cover.

He took the note. It read:

* * *

_Gold, you are strong, but your body has become too thin._

_Read this. I'll come back for it in two full moons._  
 _Before that, copy it. Memorize it. Learn it, and learn to handle a sword,_  
 _and protect these people, and other people. I have something I must do._

_Red_

* * *

He looked at the notebook. The cover read:

 **Hunter's Notes**.

Almost like an afterthought on the attached note, just below the signature, Red had added:

_I must kill God._


	3. The time is right

At a glance, the _Hunter's Notes_ looked like an aimless mishmash; but when he set out to read it, Gold realized that the loose leaves were in fact organized neatly. There were small treatises on the use of various weapons for monster-killing, all complete with stances and strategies and careful evaluations of pros and cons; long lists of exotic materials—mostly ripped monster parts—and their properties and uses in crafting gear; hermetic, unreadable charts of mystical esoterica, darkly dense pages full of symbols sorted into correspondence tables; lists of people's names and locations and what one could get from them… But most of the notebook was dedicated to monsters—hundreds of pages cramped full of information on all sorts of beasts, all of it functional and direct: mostly methods to kill them while avoiding being maimed, melted, poisoned, blazed, ripped apart, or cursed into nothingness. There were tallies of sightings and kills, a few maps with estimates of habitat areas and population numbers, notes on rumours and third-party information rated by reliability (Gold had no idea how did Red calculate all those numbers).

Almost all notes were written Red's careful, deliberate ball-and-stick handwriting, but some of the pages were inserts in a variety of strange colors and materials, some on pen and ink, some printed, old and torn, their original provenance forgotten forever. It was only on the second day of studying that Gold noticed the short chapter on Red's reminiscences of the catastrophe, unusually emotional in tone. He could feel a shiver rising cold up his neck, standing his hair up and stopping his breath short. In the dark fog that his life had become, Gold had finally found some hope of clarity. Setting everything else aside, he sat down to read, and it read thus:

> _I had been living in Mt Silver for nine years, and only descended to practice my battle skill on tournaments. After Green went missing, none could challenge me, and all victories felt pointlessly empty. But it was in one of those travels that I met a man unlike any other. His name was N. I found I could talk to N, and talk we did, for days without end, living together in caves. N made me understand the limited extent of my knowledge; N showed me that there are things that can’t be measured, and after meeting him, I couldn’t set the creatures to battle ever again. No one ever understood the magic monsters the way he did. That's how he knew what would happen; but no one listened. The world thought he insane, but the insanity was rather in the entire world but him; madness was that complacent, hideous society where institutionalized cruelty became our distraction from spiritual malaise. N was right. He showed me how the worst cruelty of all was to force the monsters to **like** their masters—to brainwash battered beasts within the drugged bliss of a portable electrochemical prison, to hook them up on synthetic candy and growth hormones, to make them believe love must be proved with pain. N was right. He was the only one to see clearly where were we going, the exponential escalation in our arrogance as we abused our perverted technology, at first to condition electric rats, then to enslave soaring dragons and soul-hungry spectral abominations, and finally to play with the pillars of the cosmos—the very Gods themselves. In our pockets. Like children's toys._
> 
> _N moved on, but I went back and cut myself from society. I kept to my mountain, preferring the company of the monsters I once absurdly called “mine”, trying to understand them as only N ever could. But I was wrong, and I should have done what N did, and work within society to try to change it. Faced with the truth, I hid myself from its implications like a Cloyster in the tempest._
> 
> _N was different. And N was right._
> 
> _I still haven't found out who did it. Several leads implicate Giovanni in the matter, but it couldn't be his idea; he had no motive, and no ability. I don't know their method, either. From the testimonials of rare survivors I surmise that they used AZ's Weapon, and wave-energy broadcasts from the Megastones, and Cyrus' research on the Gods. One grunt, now a neurotic, incoherent old wretch, told me of how they tortured N for information, of strange experiments with Mew's primordial genes… What I know for sure is that the chemical control of magic monsters was somehow broken for good. Their mind was clear. And they weren't happy._
> 
> _In my icy cave, the first one to wake was of course Charizard. In truth, I had always feared my first companion, though as a child Champion I wouldn't admit it to myself. Champion or not, that a child should control that **thing** was an aberration from the start. When he changed, there was no outward sign, but it was sudden and clear as a nightmare; it was all in his eyes; some long-suppressed darkness, intangible but piercing and dreadful, suddenly took over; **it** **was** **his** **eyes** ; even in this Gods-forsaken world I would never know terror, sheer overwhelming terror, as absolutely as I did in that instant; one glance at the flaming abyss of those eyes, and in a single instant I foresaw the entire apocalypse._
> 
> _Gods! was he gorgeous, flying fire made flesh, the embodiment of destruction. There are many Charizards in the world but none as large, none as vicious, none burning so brightly with pure hot unquenchable rage. I could barely contain him even when he was under control of the ball, and now that he could fly free, there was nothing in the world that could stop him. After that day he flew alone, smashing down beasts and man-made machines alike, and alone he blazed entire armies into cinders. The skies burned fire-red, and N was right._
> 
> _But at that moment back in the cave, survival instincts took over to tear my eyes away from his _gaze_ , and a split second was enough to evaluate the situation. The rat stared at me, confused and angry. Espeon also had his eyes fixed on me, but he was still as cold water, his inhuman intentions impossible to gauge. Blastoise was all fury, about to jump his prey, and Snorlax cocked his head in cruel childlike curiosity. And Charizard's mouth was open, and I saw the red glow behind his fangs, and I saw finality. Then the strangest of all happened. I couldn't do anything, I couldn't move my legs, and I would have turned to ash then and there, were Venusaur not in the way; but in the second-and-half that the fire busied itself with consuming him my training finally made good, and I jumped head-down into one of the small slippery passages I've come to know so well over the years. Did Venusaur actually try to help me? Or was Charizard just murdering all of his former companions? Was my life saved by accident, or in a final farewell ribbon of friendship? I'll never know, but at any rate Venusaur was certainly reduced to blackened flakes as soon as I looked away. None of the monsters could fit the tunnels but Pikachu, who could also electrocute me at a distance for a painful and unavoidable death, and I listened with acute anxiety for a telltale scuttling of rapid feet, but it never came; neither did the other beasts bring down the entire mountain on me, as they could if they tried. Later I found out that the awakening apparently made the monsters confused for a while; in this way many former trainers managed to escape, because we knew that what we did was wrong, and we knew how scary they were, and we ran._
> 
> _Cultural memory and individual minds crumbled together as the world bent down to wrathful revenge and I, weak, powerless, useless, ran. I ran as far as I could, and for years thereon I'd wake up at night with a start, imagining I could hear an approaching drip of water, a ‘pika’, the ominous crackle of fire. I still do._
> 
> _N was right._

There seemed to be more to this diary section, but it was missing.


End file.
